“You can overcome your fear of death and strap a bomb to your chest and blow up an ice cream parlor,” says Michael McCullough, associate professor of psychology and religious studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is making a point about the capacity of religious beliefs to alter behavior. “Religion can be used for incredibly good things and unspeakably awful things.”

But McCullough notes that there is a language, meaning, and application beyond religion’s historical tendency to splinter people and nations. He examines the relationship of religion and spirituality to well-being: physical, mental, and emotional. The author of books such as Handbook of Religion and Health and Forgiveness: Theory, Research, and Practice, McCullough has documented that the “religiously adherent” are healthier, more trusting in their relationships, and better able to control themselves in positive ways. He suggests there are “earthy aspects” of religion beyond any arena of controversy—aspects that help to improve diet, increase exercise, provide meaning and coherence, enhance trust, and mold behavior.

“I don’t have a religious dog in these hunts,” McCullough says. “I’m not trying to prove that one way of seeing the world is correct. What I bring to the table is research data: It doesn’t matter what brand you are, religious people live longer, and it’s not because God is reaching down and sparing them. It’s because they’re taking care of their health, they have more positive emotion, more trust and optimism.”

Yet despite his research and belief in the positive potential of religion and spirituality, McCullough readily recognizes what history has, and continues, to show us—that the language of religion is too often manipulated to further agendas. The trend today is for spirituality and religion, buoyed by a zealous media, to surge into the political and secular arena. With the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the media needed answers. Stephen Sapp, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies, was besieged with calls and inquires on Islam and its culture. Sapp, who was the closest the University had at the time to an “expert” on Islam, realized the importance of broadening the University’s resources on non-Judeo-Christian religions. Islam, he notes, is soon to become the second-most-followed religion after Christianity in the United States.

“We need to be able to make available to the South Florida community expertise in the other important approaches to the human relationship to the transcendent,” Sapp says.

Sapp’s definition of spiritual may sound a bit esoteric, but it is relevant in practical ways. At Miami Children’s Hospital, he serves as the chairman of the Bio-Ethics Committee. Composed of hospital personnel and a diverse religious cross section of the community, the committee educates and advises physicians, nurses, relatives, parents, and others who must make life-and-death decisions at the hospital.

“People who want to exclude religion from lots of things are just being unrealistic because people are religious,” Sapp says. “As the saying goes, there are no atheists in the foxhole.”

At the hospital, Sapp sometimes counsels people who have spent most of their lives ignoring any sense of the religious or spiritual. “But when you are faced with having a child in intensive care, you think ‘I’d better mobilize all the resources I can,’ and prayer is one of those.” The Bio-Ethics Committee is called to work, Sapp explains, “at the ragged edges of life where religious and spiritual resources tend to get mobilized.”

ome people use the terms spirituality and religion interchangeably. For others religion connotes a traditional approach, and spirituality offers a broader scope.

Gail Ironson, M.D., Ph.D. ’86, a Department of Psychology colleague of McCullough’s, procured a clinical definition of the terms. Through her research on the psychological factors that protect the health of people with HIV, cancer, or cardiovascular disease, she queried HIV-positive patients regarding their religious or spiritual beliefs. Only 8 percent of her survey population defined themselves as primarily religious, while over 80 percent defined themselves as spiritual and/or religious.

The findings prompted her to seek a behavior definition. A questionnaire delineated these beliefs in terms of specific behaviors—having a sense of peace, comfort, strength, and meaning from your religious or spiritual beliefs; faith in God; attending services; practicing rituals; holding a compassionate view of others. The traditionally religious prioritized the factors of faith in God and religious behavior, while the spiritual noted sense of peace, faith, and compassion as their most important benchmarks. Spirituality, she concluded, is defined individually and with more flexibility, whereas religiousness occurs in the context of a religious institution with more of a structure and body of rules for fostering a connection to a higher power.

HIV patients who describe themselves as spiritual or religious, Ironson has found, live longer. Yet a large subset of these same patients—gay men—often have had to step outside the barred doors of traditional religion in their quest to deepen their connection to the sacred.

“Most people have a fundamental desire to connect to the sacred,” Ironson explains. “Some do that through a fundamentalist religion, and some people do it through yoga, meditation, or more individualistic ways. Where they get at odds with each other is when one group says: ‘I have the answer, and it’s the only answer.’”

Ironson currently administers two grants totaling $6.5 million to examine the psychological factors related to HIV and specifically how expressive writing benefits well-being and health of HIV patients. “As a psychologist,” Ironson says, “I’m interested in what helps people to cope and to thrive, and spirituality is one of those key things that can help people.”

McCullough, Ironson, Sapp, and other University professors across a number of disciplines suggest that both the University and the South Florida community would benefit from further research and dialogue on the impact of religion and spirituality on our well-being.

“Whether here or in the Middle East, we can both agree that we’re tired of fighting or tired of fear,” says McCullough. “Maybe when the needs are bad enough, even those who are afraid of other points of view will be ready to listen a little bit.”

McCullough, along with Ironson, is one of just 20 U.S. researchers funded by the Metanexus Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. He would like to further investigate how the sciences fuse with religion and spirituality. “There’s a real relevance of religion and spirituality to a lot of domains of life.” He cites: economics—how people spend their money and time; political science—you can’t talk about modern politics without including religion; business—there’s great interest in spiritual leadership; medicine—issues of death, dying, and decision making; communications—how we reference religion in the mainstream; and more.

“If we can encourage young faculty to think and write and research this stuff, we can develop insights about this powerful social force,” McCullough says.